


The sweetest summer

by diesis



Category: A Song of Ice and Fire & Related Fandoms, A Song of Ice and Fire - George R. R. Martin, Game of Thrones (TV)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Modern Setting, Alternate Universe - Modern Westeros, Alternate Universe - Soulmates, Slow Burn, Soulmates
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-08-22
Updated: 2020-08-23
Packaged: 2021-03-06 21:35:42
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 3
Words: 5,892
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26045875
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/diesis/pseuds/diesis
Summary: "Why must there be a scar?" She asked."So only you will know what your mark looked like." Septa Roelle explained, listlessly."It doesn't make sense. If my soulmate doesn't know what it looked like, how can he know... how can he know it's me?" Her eleven-years-old self retorted."He'll have to ask. I've heard someone saying that it's a matter of trust. Most people lie, anyway.""But... who would lie about such a thing?""Oh, my sweet summer child." The septa said, without any sweetness at all. There was nothing sweet about summer.
Relationships: Jaime Lannister & Brienne of Tarth, Jaime Lannister/Brienne of Tarth
Comments: 22
Kudos: 150
Collections: Jaime x Brienne Fic Exchange 2020





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

  * For [TreeOfTime](https://archiveofourown.org/users/TreeOfTime/gifts).



> Prompt: soulmate AU.

Brienne hated summer. She'd been hating this season as long as she remembered. 

  
It wasn't just the sun, that turned her skin mercilessly from splotchy-freckled to lobster-splotchy-freclkled. It wasn't just the heat, that made her sweat like a pig - as if she needed to be more beast-like than she already was in every other season, and it wasn't just the boredom between the end of an academic year and the autumn exam session.  
Sometimes, she wondered how she would have fared in old times, when Westerosi seasons lasted years and years, and she resolved that she probably would have fled from Tarth to the Wall and joined the Night Watch.

The problem was, summer did never bring anything good. Not to her, at least. 

•••

She was too little to recall it, but on a bright summer day her father came back home from the hospital alone, instead of bringing along her mother and the twins she was expecting.  
It was summer, when Gal challenged her to a swimming race too far from the beach.

She remembers exactly the day she got her soulmark and, for once, the cloudless sky and the warm air of the early morning didn't seem to curse her, when she woke up and found a small red sword-shaped stain on her left cheek. Brienne was only eleven, but she knew what that mark meant: somewhere, somehow, someone was going to love her, to truly love her (no matter her appearance, she already knew she was ugly, back then).   
But on that same day, she saw the look of pity and disgust on her septa's face, when she explained how exactly the soulmarks work. The woman's words were carved in Brienne's memory as much as their ineluctable effect was carved - almost literally - on her skin. "The mark is just the first step. If you're supposed to meet your soulmate, then sooner or later you're going to get a wound and a scar on the place where the mark appeared." She said, dismissively. "Usually, they are not on one's face. It's not a great loss, anyway." The old hag added.

Four years later, while she was working as a volunteer at a summer camp, her group got attacked by a mad Rottweiler during a walk. The beast bit her face so forcefully that it almost chewed away her cheek. Her only relief was that the children she looked after didn't get injured. Whoever her soulmate was, he would never look twice at her, after that.

She met Hyle Hunt during her first year in Horn Hill College, but their first date was after the end of the last semester. She had decided to remain in the Reach for the summer, to avoid old classmates and bad memories, and was a bit astonished when this guy of the biochemistry class asked her out. Maybe he's the one, she'd thought. Maybe he won't care about how I look, after all.  
On the second date he brought her on the hills of Highgarden to watch shooting stars from the ruins of the old keep. Brienne was more interested in the ancient remains than in astronomy, and Hyle was more interested in shoving his tongue inside her mouth and his hands in the waistline of her trousers.  
When she asked him about his soulmark, he took of his shirt and pointed at a small faint, old scar on his arm. He asked what her mark had looked like, and when she answered he muttered "the same", absentmindedly.  
She discovered the truth about the bet a week later, from a post by Ron Connington on the college online forum. In autumn, she moved to the child psychology department of Winterfell University.

All in all, it was for the best, because there she found professor Catelyn Stark. And when her father came to visit on winter break, he met her too.   
Brienne looked at her as a mentor and an academic authority, but Selwyn just saw Cat, widow and mother of five, her cerulean eyes, her gentle smile. "I know she's not my soulmate." He explained to his daughter when he announced their engagement. "It doesn't mean that we can't be happy together. Happier than if we remained alone, I mean."   
So by her twentieth nameday Brienne, who had been an only child since Galladon's death, became a part of a loud and lively pack and her summers improved considerably. 

Well, except for the three weeks they usually passed on Tarth for the holidays. That meant going back to her childhood home and spending most days on the beach with the kids. And the Lannisters. One Lannister in particular.

•••

The first day of their vacation, Brienne made her way to the beach resort where she'd spent most of her miserable summers as a child an then a teen, with Arya in tow, while Sansa pushed little Brandon's wheelchair - the boy had broken both his legs playing in Winterfell skate park just a couple of days before their departure, so they'd hired it for as long as he was in plaster. Robb, Cat's eldest, lived in Volantis with her soulmate, and Rickon, who was only four at the time, was going to come later in the afternoon with his mother and Selwyn.

In her bag Brienne had an old beach towel, the sunscreen, a bottle of fresh water and two books: an essay she was supposed to study for the forensics psychiatry exam, and a fantasy novel based on the tales of Goldenhand the Just and the Blue Knight of Tarth.   
Mr. Seaworth, the resort manager, greeted her heartily, and assigned them the number of a beach umbrella on the third line from the sea, close to the walkway so it would be easier to carry Bran.   
Brienne was still at the beginning of the path when she heard someone yelling in a high pitched voice. When they arrived at the umbrella, it was clear that she was not going to have enough peace even to read fiction, let alone for studying.

The woman who paced nervously beside the nearest umbrella was extremely beautiful, extremely angry and extremely loud.   
"Tell him he won't see them EVER AGAIN if he dares to do that!!!" She shrieked in her phone, gesticulating with her perfectly manicured hand. The nail polish matched her dark red bikini and her hair shone like the big golden ring on her middle finger.   
The blonde goddess shot them a single, haughty look of her emerald eyes and kept on speaking on the phone. Beneath the umbrella, a girl and a boy, almost of Arya's age, were silently building a sand castle. Another boy, maybe a bit older than Sansa, played a shoot-'em-up game on a console. The sound of the videogame filtered through his headphones whenever the mother stopped screaming to catch her breath.  
Brienne opened the umbrella with a swift move, hung her bag on the hook, helped Bran to sit on a deckchair and spent the following week pretending not to hear every detail of Cersei Lannister's very, very nasty divorce.  
Her morning run on the seaside became every day a bit longer.

Can't get much worse, Brienne thought while she put on the tanning lotion, and she was wrong.   
During the weekend, Cersei disappeared and the three children came to the beach with a man - and what a man: dark hair, blue eyes, a scar across his lower chest, Uncle Ren smiled at her - at her! - when he passed near her sun bed and then they started a chat about this and that.   
In the afternoon, while Arya and Bran played with Tommen and Myrcella, Renly waved at someone who was coming from the walkway. To Brienne's surprise, Margaery Tyrell, whom she knew from her year at Horn Hill, and a curly-haired pretty boy who introduced himself as Loras, showed up on the beach. Later, the two men and the children went for a stroll on the shoreline, and Marge filled her in on the whole Baratheon-Lannister family drama. Joffrey, two yards from them, shouted insults at his virtual opponent. 

The following week, at dawn, someone else was running on the empty shore, coming towards her from the fashion - so to speak - area of Evenfall. The district where the Ms Lannister had bought a cottage after she filed for the divorce, as Marge had said. Brienne knew the coast almost by heart. She turned up the volume of her headphones, and set her pace. If she speeded up a bit, she could reach the choke point close to the Old Hall Cliff before the man, and she wouldn't have to slow down or to stop to let him pass first.   
For the briefest moment, she looked at the sea. She could pick almost exactly the spot where Galladon drowned. And the place where she dived the day she came back from her surgery, and cried, and cried, and cried. The salt water seared on her wound, she searched it with trembling fingers. She tried to recall the shape of the small red sword, suddenly realising she was never going to see it again.  
("Why must there be a scar?" She asked.   
"So only you will know what your mark looked like." Septa Roelle explained, listlessly.   
"It doesn't make sense. If my soulmate doesn't know what it looked like, how can he know... how can he know it's me?" Her eleven-years-old self retorted.   
"He'll have to ask. I've heard someone saying that it's a matter of trust. Most people lie, anyway."   
"But... who would lie about such a thing?"  
"Oh, my sweet summer child." The septa said, without any sweetness at all. There was nothing sweet about summer.)

The man on the other side of the cliff was tall and muscular, golden blond, and the run didn't seem to affect his good looking. Now they were close enough to discern each other's face. He watched her from head to toe, with a cocky gaze. Then, suddenly, he sprinted. They reached the narrow strip of sand at the same time: rocks on one side, water on the other. He kept on running, heading straight towards Brienne, as if he were a knight of old, charging.  
In the end, she had no choice. She had to shift left, ending up inside the water. Her soaked running shoes slipped on a rock, and she almost went belly-up. She managed to remain standing, but her t-shirt got drenched, and she thanked the gods that her mp3 reader was waterproof. "Watch out, idiot!" Brienne shouted.   
The moron turned and looked at her up and down for a moment, appraisingly. What are you looking at?, she wanted to say, even though she already knew the answer: her broad shoulders, her non-existent breasts, her broken nose, her plain face, her mauled cheek. Everyone looked at her like that. But the arrogant stranger just turned again, abruptly, and ran away.

Later in the morning, she read under the umbrella while Sansa chatted with a girl of her age she'd met the day before. Cat and her father had gone to the zoo with the younger children, and took also Tommen and Myrcella with them. Brienne was amazed at Catelyn's politeness with Cersei, since the two women clearly couldn't stand each other, but the children had made friends, so Cat just grinned and bore it.  
"Jaaaaiiime!" Cersei cooed. "Finally you came!"  
"Sister." A deep voice answered, and behind her sunglasses Brienne saw the obnoxious runner.   
Margaery had said that the only decent person in the family was Cersei's youngest brother, a Tyrone something. Evidently not this one.

Brienne felt his gaze on her, pretended to keep on reading her novel.   
"So, that's really a woman." He said, loud enough for her to hear.  
"Who?" Cersei asked. "Ah, that one. She's the neighbours' eldest, Brenna." She added, like she was talking about a very interesting cockroach.   
"My name is Brienne." She stated, standing up to her full height. "I'd say nice to meet you, but we've already met, haven't we?" One thing that she'd learned, having been bullied quite often in the past, was that usually being self-confident worked very well in shutting them up. Not with Jaime, though.  
"Of course we did, how could I forget such a strapping wench?" He smirked, and she would have laughed at the absurdly old-fashioned word, if it hadn't been so infuriating, not to say that the insult came from a man that was at least ten years older than she was, instead than from a pimply high school guy. She knew she was blushing - she always did it when she was angry, but on the outside it was often mistaken for embarrassment.  
"My name is..."  
"Brienne, well, wench. What do I get if I call you by your name? Does it make you wet as I did this morning?" At that, she snapped and closed the distance between them. She was glad of her height in these moments, because she towered over him by some inches.  
"You'd better shut up, sir." She hissed.   
"Sir? Are we in the army?" He retorted, teasingly. Brienne grimaced. Selwyn had been in the navy for a lifetime, before retiring some years before.  
"We aren't, because no one taught you how to behave. There are two girls of twelve, right there, and they don't deserve to hear your sexual innuendos." Her tone was deadly serious. She didn't have the time nor the desire to lecture him about the risks of overexposing teenagers to adult contents. It worked anyway, because his green eyes darted a quick glance to Sansa and her friend, who had stopped talking to follow their bickering, and then he stepped away.  
"I had been in the army, by the way, wench." He said, turning from her. Cersei looked at them with icy eyes, questioningly. "Cers, you wanna take a walk?" Was his answer.  
"Joff. Joff!" Cersei had to grab the boy's headphones. "Uncle Jaime and I will be back soon." 

For the next five days, the man kept on teasing her, from time to time, usually when Cersei wasn't there or was too busy with her phone calls. Otherwise, they pointedly ignored each other, both if they crossed paths in the early morning run and during the rest of the day at the resort.  
Brienne concentrated on Dr. Qyburn's treatise, while Jaime made a big show of reading his own copy of "The winds of winter", though his reading speed was so slow that he probably would have ended it the following year.

This, until the day Arya decided to bring Nymeria. The Starks had adopted the black and grey half-blood from a shelter some years before, and the little girl was her favourite human.  
The children had been chatting about what they wanted to be when they grow up. Arya wanted to be a ninja, Bran had said he would have liked to invent a time travel machine, Myrcella wanted to become a Dorne-Jones-like archaeologist. Tommen settled on becoming a vet. When he told Arya about the three cats he'd left at his father's in King's Landing, she insisted that he absolutely had to meet her dog, and took her on the beach that same afternoon.

No one of the adults actually saw what happened: one moment the little crossbreed was wagging her tail at Tommen, and the next one Joffrey was holding his bloodied hand, screaming unrepeatable curses.   
In the chaos that followed, Brienne expected that Jaime would act as the insufferable fool he'd been in the previous days. Instead, he was the one who tersely sent Joffrey at the infirmary of the beach office ("It's just a scratch", he said after examining his nephew's hand), talked Cersei out of pressing charges against Brienne's family (the woman had started rambling about putting down the little bitch, and Brienne couldn't tell if she was talking about the dog or about Arya), and agreed with Cat and Selwyn on calling their insurance company as soon as possible. 

"It's always the same old story." Myrcella commented later, when Cersei, Jaime, Catelyn and Selwyn left to check on Joffrey and to settle down the insurance issues. "Joff or mum make a mess, and uncle Jaime has to sort things out." She stated, sombrely, suddenly looking much older than her age.   
"Joffrey kept on pulling Nymeria's tail." Tommen explained, gently scratching the dog's ears.   
"Is it true that he was in the army?" Sansa asked, out of nowhere. Myrcella got even more serious. "Yes it is. He doesn't like to talk about it, anyway."

Brienne thought that the summer had been eventful enough. Then, two days later, before leaving, she went out for a drink with Margaery, her brother and Renly, and the two guys spent the whole evening holding hands and making out.   
When their return flight to Winterfell took off, she looked at the sea from the window and thanked the gods it was almost autumn again.

•••


	2. Chapter 2

The following year, they arrived in Evenfall on a late afternoon. The sun was setting down, and the sky was so clear that you could see the lights of the mainland, on the opposite side of the Shipbreacker Bay. This time, Cat had remained in Winterfell with Bran and Rickon: Brandon's physical therapy was taking longer than expected. The poor boy had already had three surgeries, and another one, hopefully the last, was scheduled in a couple of days. But Catelyn insisted that the rest of the family go to Tarth anyway. If Bran recovered quickly, then they would come later.   
Goodwin, a friend of Selwyn's, invited him and the girls to dinner. They had served together in the Stormlands fleet for years, and now the old sea dog owned a tourist boat rental.   
"Gods, the island is full of paparazzi this year." Goodwin's wife said, turning off the TV volume while they set the table. On the screen, the local news showed a pretty girl with dark skin and curls talking into a microphone in front of a gated garden. At the end of the garden there was a lavish house with a huge wisteria plant climbing the front porch.   
"What's going on there, Etta?" Selwyn asked.  
"Pah! A tycoon died in a bad car crash in King's Landing. But his widow has a villa here in Evenfall, so they're all out there trying to get an interview, either from the woman or from his children." Etta explained.  
"They should leave them be. The children, I mean." Brienne stated. "They just lost their father, there's no need at all to torment them."  
"When it happened to us, mum sent Bran, Arya and me at Uncle Edmure's, even though nobody wanted to have an interview." Sansa chimed in, trying to conceal the sadness in her voice. Eddard Stark was a police officer and he'd died on duty. "Poor kids." She added.   
"The food is ready!" Goodwin called from the kitchen, and Etta switched off the TV.  
Later in the evening, Brienne's phone rang. It was Margaery. She had texted her before leaving Winterfell, but didn't expect that her friend would call so soon.   
"Hi Marge!"  
"Hi Brie... are you already in Evenfall?" She seemed concerned.   
"Yes, we arrived a couple of hours ago. Is everything ok?"   
"Yes. I mean, no. I need to ask you a favour. Do you know someone who can hire a boat? Better, hire the boat and sail it?"

•••

The weather was going to be good. The Narrow Sea rolled smoothly under the hull, and a soft breeze tousled her hair. The last time Brienne had piloted a boat she'd been seventeen, and the cabin cruiser they rented from Goodwin was bigger than the motorboat that Selwyn had owned before moving to Winterfell, but she'd learned to sail years before she learned to drive, and she felt confident and at ease. She looked at the deep blue of the water, let the sound of the waves fill her ears and for a moment she almost missed living on the island.  
Sansa watched the horizon with a bewitched gaze. "It's so romantic, Brie..." She whispered.  
Arya bounced at the stern "It's ef-ef-effing awesome sis'!!!"   
"Arya!"  
"I didn't say it!" The little girl stuck out her tongue at her sister. "Are we going to that small island down there, Brie?" She asked.  
"Yes, but we have to pick up the other kids first." Brienne answered calmly.  
When they reached the small pier behind the Baratheon's mansion, Margaery, Tommen and Myrcella were already waiting on the dock. 

Robert Baratheon had died five days before, and Cersei had flown immediately to King's Landing to arrange the funeral and to deal with lawyers and relatives. Joffrey was on a summer camp in Lannisport, but the smaller children stayed on Tarth with Renly, though, and they had been stuck in the house since their mother left, to avoid reporters and meddlers.   
When Marge came to visit with Loras, she realised that the two siblings couldn't remain locked inside the villa much longer. A boat trip would be a good distraction, and Brienne knew a lot of little hidden beaches nearby where they could spend some peaceful hours.

When Brienne got off the _Kraken_ , Myrcella ran towards her and hugged her.  
"Oh Brie, I'm so happy to see you!" The girl said. She had grown up so much since the previous summer: the child had become an austere little woman, and she was only eleven. "It's been an horrible year. First Uncle Jaime, and now..."  
Brienne's heart skipped a beat. She couldn't believe that Jaime Lannister was... "Your uncle?"  
Myrcella looked up at her, puzzled.   
"Oh, no, don't worry!" Margaery shook her head. "Jaime is alive. But... Well, you'll see him, Ren and Loras are bringing him along."  
She put a cool box in Brienne's hands and went on tiptoes to whisper in her ear. "He's still a bit drunk from last night, but we couldn't just leave him at home in this state."  
Brienne's eyes widened, because it was hard to imagine him dead, but maybe it was harder to imagine that the smug fitness god she met one year before could become an alcoholic.  
When Loras and Renly pushed him out of the back door of the house, she understood.

The man who followed the couple was a shadow of his former self, and he still was one of the handsomest men she'd ever met.   
He had grown thinner and his hair was longer, a stubble darkened his jaw and then Brienne saw the stump where once his right hand had been.   
He looked at her, lowered his gaze and shook his head. "You didn't tell me who the _friend with a boat_ was, Margaery." Jaime mumbled.  
The children had already got on board, and when she helped him to climb onto the boat, he seemed to brighten up.   
"Brienne of Tarth, our knight in shining armour!" He greeted her, and Brienne suddenly remembered how much she'd wanted to punch him.  
"It's Evenstar." She spat. "My name is Brienne Evenstar, not _Brienne of Tarth_."  
"But you're from Tarth, so technically I'm right."  
Brienne started the engine, snorting. Margaery shot her a pleading look. _For the children's sake_ , she said.  
"Brienne, do you know that Evenstar was the title of Tarth's sovereign, in old times?" Myrcella asked, and of course Brienne knew it.  
"You see, wench. Maybe after all you might be a descendant of the Blue Knight!" Jaime said walking unsteadily into the cabin, touching things he shouldn't have touched even with his non-dominant hand.   
"Which part of _she was a strong, righteous and_ beautiful _knight_ didn't you get, Lannister?" She said, citing the book they both had been reading. The boat moved slowly,  
"Your eyes." He said, after a long while, and at first she didn't even realise that he was answering to her previous question. "You have beautiful eyes. Do they call it the Sapphire Island because of them?"  
Brienne looked at the sea, and caught a glimpse of her own reflection in the window of the boat. Tarth was called like that because of its crystal clear waters, not for those eyes that almost seemed wasted on her face, but she blushed anyway.   
Jaime wobbled closer to the boat's wheel, and she grabbed him by his shirt. "I'm not telling you to fuck off openly just because of the children, Lannister." She hissed, her lips brushing his ear.  
He grinned, he was still drunk.   
"At least you aren't more courteous only because I'm a cripple, wench." He answered, his breath warm on her neck.  
Then his face turned into a grimace, and he barely managed to run out the cabin and hang out from the parapet before vomiting.  
By the time they reached the island, he had sobered up.

The two weeks that followed were oddly pleasant.   
Every day Brienne would pick up the group at the pier, and then they sailed to one of the little islands of the archipelago, or in a beach on the coast where they wouldn't meet a soul.   
Brienne told them legends from her island, because Myrcella loved them, the children played an laughed (but sometimes the four of them would just sit in a corner and talk in a hushed voice, and she knew that they were talking about their fathers). Renly had an old battered guitar and he sang with Loras and Margaery and Sansa. Jaime spent most of his time with his nephews, and bantering with Brienne. Or talking to her. Or discussing their favourite books, since she discovered they both loved history and fantasy. Or mocking her about the way a blue boy short bikini looked good on her. Or cheering shamelessly when they played beach volleyball and Brienne and Margaery beat Loras and a Renly. 

("Child psychology? Really, wench?"  
"What's wrong with it, Lannister?"  
"I just... didn't think you the were type. You look like you could crush a man between those endless legs of yours."  
She ignored the not so subtle hint. "I thought about enlisting in the navy, when I was fifteen."  
He furrowed his brow.   
"Then my father dissuaded me." After the accident with the dog, but she didn't say it. She hadn't asked about his hand either, Margaery told it happened while he was doing his job as chief security officer in his father's company.  
"I can't believe that someone could convince you to do something, stubborn as you are. But your father is a wise man." His tone was almost sad, Brienne recalled what Myrcella said about his past in the army.  
"He said I could be helpful in other ways."  
"That's my girl!" He smiled, looking at the sea.  
She wasn't his girl, but by the end of the week she was hopelessly in love with him, and she forced herself to remember what had happened with Hyle, and that Jaime was just trying to be nice.)

Then on Sunday Renly and Loras went back on the mainland to attend at the cremation of Robert's body. Cersei forbid them from bringing the children.  
"I'm not... I... we hadn't seen him for months before the car crash, and we didn't talk much after the divorce." Myrcella said, sitting on the bench of the boat and crying on Sansa's shoulder. "But he was my dad anyway."  
Tommen just read a comic, fidgeting with his cap.  
Jaime's bickering was more bitter than usual.  
  
They had just ended the picnic, when the wind picked up suddenly from East. Brienne checked the weather app on her phone. The forecast still indicated that it would be sunny until the evening, but Brienne had seen enough of summer storms to believe it.   
"We should go immediately... I don't want to wait until those clouds come too close" She told to Margaery.  
"Sansa, where are Tommen and Arya?" Jaime asked.  
"I don't know, mr. Lannister. They were playing down there." The girl pointed to a spot near the cliffs. A small path climbed up to the clifftop.  
"Damn." Jaime muttered.

They found the children after half an hour. They were playing merrily with wooden sticks in a clearing on the western side of the small island.   
When the cabin cruiser finally left the shore, the sea was rough and dark thunder clouds loomed in the sky.  
Brienne tried to pick up speed, yet the waves were big and slowed them down. The coast of the main island wasn't far, but they weren't going to reach it before it started raining.   
The first raindrops fell heavily on the cabin roof and on the window, and then suddenly she couldn't see a thing through the wall of water that poured down from the sky.   
She ordered everyone to put the life vest on.   
"Are we going to die?" Tommen asked, his hands clasping the support bar so tightly that the knuckles went white.  
"No, Brienne will save us." Arya declared, but her voice was shaking.   
Seawater and rain came in from the rear of the small cabin, soaking them and pooling at their feet. Margaery and Sansa embraced the smaller children, and they all were screaming.   
"Hold the wheel, Jaime." She shouted over the roar of the storm. When his hand held it firmly, she tightened one end of a rope around his chest and the other end on a bar. "Beneath that bench there's a bucket. Pick it up and try to empty the hull, we're talking on water."  
For a second, he looked baffled. Then he scrambled to his feet and went to retrieve the bucket.

On her left, Brienne glimpsed a flash: the lighthouse of Morne. She turned the boat's wheel, and in few minutes the rolling of waves became less turbulent, as they finally reached the port.   
Jaime held the wheel again as she mored the boat to the nearest dock and then he followed her on the pier. They lay side by side under the rain, exhausted.  
Later, when Selwyn and Goodwin came with two cars to bring them home, he sat in the back seat on her right, and held her hand until they got back in Evenfall.  
"Jaime." He said when Goodwin parked in front of the Baratheon's gate. "It took you all this to call me by my name."

The following evening, Jaime said they all were going out for dinner, and he made a reservation in one of Evenfall nicest restaurants.  
Brienne was supposed to pick up him, Myrcella and Tommen at seven o'clock. She had spent the half of the afternoon to decide what to wear, and had also let Sansa help her with the makeup. She climbed the stairs of the porch, dried her sweating palms on her black trousers, checked her reflection in the window, trying to look only at the loose sky-blue shirt and not at her face.   
As soon as Jaime opened the door, she understood something was wrong.   
He had shaved his beard, and wore a plastic prosthetic hand that he'd never used on the boat. His breath smelled of wine. After the first day, he'd never been drunk on their trips. Behind his shoulders, Myrcella and Tommen waited for her with reddened eyes. He didn't let her in.  
"I'm sorry Brienne. I can't come tonight. I'm sure the kids will enjoy themselves anyway." He raised his left hand and was about to touch her shoulder, but then stopped and dropped it, as Cersei appeared at the other end of the corridor.  
From the pathway leading to the gate, they could hear them yelling at each other. The two children didn't say a word until they arrived at the restaurant. 

Margaery went back to Highgarden on Tuesday morning, and Brienne didn't hear from Jaime until they left again to go home in Winterfell.

•••  



	3. Chapter 3

None of them went to Evenfall the next summer.   
Selwyn had fallen ill at the beginning of spring, just after her graduation, and when they usually booked the flight to Tarth he was going under the third round of chemotherapy.

At the beginning of the winter, three days after his funeral, Brienne received a text from an unknown number.  
"Margaery told me about your father. I'm sorry. He was a good man. J."  
She was still reading it for the second time, disbelievingly, when the phone beeped again.  
"I missed you last summer, wench."

•••

The scent of the wisteria filled the air under the porch as Brienne and Jaime sat on the wooden steps.   
Inside the house, Arya, Bran, Rickon and Tommen ate popcorn watching a cartoon, while Sansa and Myrcella talked about boys in front of an ice cream in the kitchen.  
They remained in silence, watching the garden and the hedge that surrounded it, listening to the sound of the sea that came from the other side of the house.  
"It's a beautiful place." Jaime said, finally. "That's why I decided to move here after Cersei's trial. It will be good even for Joff, when he'll come out from the centre. "

In the last months, after Selwyn's death, they had phoned each other almost every day.  
On the first time he called her, he told her about the years he had spent in the army, about the man he killed instead of protecting him, about the reason he still had nightmares of blood and fire, sometimes.  
She knew about his sister and her eldest son, too. Cersei had been convicted of having hired a killer to sabotage her former husband's car, while Joffrey was undergoing rehab for his gambling and drug addiction.   
Jaime had told her also of their incestuous relationship, that had lasted until his accident, and of all the other ones she'd had while they'd been lovers. He didn't know for sure if all three the children were his, but he didn't mind. He had asked for their custody anyway.

"In winter it's even better. Less tourists." Brienne said, recalling her life on the island.  
"But in summer I can spend some time with you." Jaime retorted, and Brienne felt a lump in her throat.   
He looked at her and smiled.   
He always smiled at her so earnestly that she couldn't doubt his affection anymore, and it was wonderful and frightening at the same time.  
"What happened?" He asked, caressing the scars on her cheek. He had never asked this before.  
"A wild dog." She said, plainly.  
"Not like Nymeria." He chuckled.  
"Not at all. What about your hand?"  
"I had tried to save one of my father's employees from an assault. Three of them, it wouldn't have been a big deal, but one of those bastards had a gun and I hadn't. I got shot right through the wrist. The surgeons tried to save the hand, but it wasn't possible."  
He paused, looking at his stump. "Do you know what I miss most about my hand?"  
Brienne shook her head.  
"I had my soulmark on it. Right here" He said, placing his fingers on a point between the palm and the wrist on Brienne's right hand. She shivered. He didn't move away, so she raised her left to touch her mauled face.   
"I had a soulmark here, too."  
"Am I supposed to ask you what it looked like?"   
"No." She answered, and leaned in to kiss him.

•••

The End


End file.
